EU intervention vs. national autonomy: do citizens really care?

ABSTRACT

Conventional wisdom about the European sovereign debt crisis and its handling defends that fiscal austerity is unpopular and that external conditionality and/or imposition on national democracies generates backlash. However, not enough research has addressed this question: How willing are citizens to accept unpopular policies imposed on their national governments by European institutions? Would they object to unpopular policies less if these were coming from their national representatives? In this article, we propose a survey experiment, complemented by four focus groups, to test whether citizens’ willingness to accept economic policies varies depending on whether the decision originates in the national parliament or in EU institutions. The experiment was conducted in Spain in 2017. Our results show that agreement with a particular policy does not depend on the policy-making actor but on the policy’s content. The bitter pill of austerity is no less bitter because elected politicians decide it at home. Similarly, EU ‘diktat’ does not make a popular policy less popular. Our conclusion is that Spanish citizens during the Euro crisis objected to the policy of austerity due in large part to its content and not to the EU intervention in favour of implementing it.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• responsiveness
• fiscal austerity
• Euro crisis
• Spain
• survey experiment
• focus groups

Notes

1 In 2019, a fifth national competitor emerged from the far right, Vox.

2 The Spanish firm 40db (formerly MyWord) realized the sampling and data-collection.

3 We chose the experimental method precisely because ‘it also allows for analysis of “what if” scenarios’ (Bernauer et al., 2016, p. 4) of policies and decision-makers. At the same time, however, we wanted to confront respondents with as close a real-world situation as possible, following previous academic calls to examine the firmness of citizens’ preferences for democratic procedures in less abstract and more realistic scenarios (Font et al., 2015; Van der Molen, 2017).

4 As Figure 3 shows, some of the variables have a skewed distribution. We have replicated all the analyses taking the log of the dependent variable (moving the scale from 1 to 11 to make the logarithmic transformation feasible). Results, however, did not change substantially.

5 The focus groups were designed and conducted by the Spanish firm Twiga Research & Strategy.

6 Examples of this are the following: ‘In earlier times, politicians had principles, charisma, ideals’ (right-wing participant);‘One could see Rajoy [former Spanish PM] in European summits, unable to speak English; embarrassing’ (left); ‘Our politicians are less prepared’ (right); ‘You can see them in parliament playing Candy Crash’ (left), ‘or reading the newspaper’ (right); ‘They hang on to their elected positions because they would be unable to find another job’ (right); ‘And at the end of the day they receive their salary regardless’ (left).

7 ‘I have never heard, for example, that there is corruption in Denmark’ (right).

8 The other European institutions spontaneously mentioned by the participants, without prompting by the moderator, were the European Parliament, the European Commission, the European Council and the (Strasbourg) European Court for Human Rights.

9 In Table 5, however, the coefficient of ideology is significant in every model (except in model 2, special taxes).

10 Examples of the reactions when asked to imagine that the retirement age would be extended by five years up to 70: ‘To die working’ (right); ‘That is the last drop’ (right); ‘They take away our life and illusions’ (left); ‘No future’ (left); ‘And then it will be up to 75 years’ (right); ‘It is anti-natural; we should actually move in the opposite direction’ (left).

11 Examples of reactions when participants were told that these policies would be adopted by the Spanish parliament: ‘My salary is reduced, the price of fuel increases, I cannot retire in my life, and, if I am unlucky and lose my job … I go out and lose it’ (right); ‘I would think that they are a bunch of assholes at the service of large fortunes’ (left). Examples of reactions if the policies came from the European Central Bank: ‘why would they decide on the unemployment benefits in Spain?’ (left); ‘They don’t know us, we are just a number for them’ (right); ‘If they say so … they are more clever than our good-for-nothings’ (left); ‘I would think that the situation is really alarming and that we must be in a really dark place, as Greece’ (left); ‘I would be disappointed with the performance of our national government’ (right); ‘The men in black, coming from Europe, arrived in Greece and said: this is the situation, I am the one who pays, I own you’ (right); ‘I would be really scared if the policy was imposed by Europe’ (left); ‘The government did not do its homework’ (left).